Archive for the ‘Community’ Category

February Updates – SQL Engine, ODBA and MySQL Conference …

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

It has been quiet on the blog lately, but things behind the scenes have made quite som progress. After the long hours preceding our Mid-December Release of the 0.10 version most members of the team used the quiet time over Christmas to get some rest. And, of course, to think of new and exciting stuff for the upcoming 0.11 release. While no date has been set for the release, we anticipate something around MySQL Con Mid April.

SQL Engine Rewrite

Mike has investigated some new tools to rewrite the SQL Engine. The issue has been extensively discussed on the mailing list and is being tracked on the Forge as Task #78. We welcome all feedback anyone may have on Lemon, Quex or related technologies.

Related to this effort, also the function backend is being refactored. The refactoring will allow the BlackRay internal functions to be exposed via all APIs as well as SQL, and arbitrary nesting of functions is possible this way. See the in-depth discussion on the mailing list.

Open Database Alliance

BlackRay has become the first Non-MySQL derived database project to join the ODBA. Felix has also been elected to serve on the board of directors and is the proposed Vice-Chairman of the organization. A formal board meeting will take place in April, as part of the MySQL Conference.

Other Stuff

Also, on a different Note: It is close to Valentine’s day, and the FSF Europe has started a little campaign. No, not about flowers and chocolates, about the love for free sowftware.

I love Free Software!

BlackRay at the OpenSQL Camp in Portland

Monday, November 9th, 2009

We are excited to be at another North American un-conference again so shortly after the Florida Linux Show. This time the OpenSQL Camp set up their tent in Portland, and Felix will be attending the camp.

OpenSQL Camp 2009 in Portland, OR

A major topic is the upcoming 0.10 release as well as the roadmap towards the expected 1.0 GA release in March 2010. All questions are welcome, and of course we will bring some goodies as well. See you in Portland next weekend!

[Update]

Some pictures from the camp.

Pictures from the Florida Linux Show

Wednesday, October 28th, 2009

On October 24th Frank and Mike were present at the Florida Linux Show 2009 in Orlando. An interested crowd was quite eager to lern about BlackRay and the people behind it. We gave away lanyards, T-Shirts and pretty flyers.

Frank also held a talk in the conference, which was well received by a medium sized audience. The slides are available below, and are unmodified from the OpenSQL Camp talk earlier this year.

Sorry for the picture quality though, they were taken with Frank’s mobile phone.

BlackRay is coming to the sunshine state!

Monday, October 19th, 2009

FLS2009A

We are excited to report that we have been kindly invited to present at the Florida Linux Show 2009 in beautiful Orlando on October 24th. Frank and Mike will be exhibiting the engine, and there is going to be a 40 Minute presentation as well. See you all there and don’t forget to ask for your free lanyard!

Presentation from OpenSQL Camp available

Sunday, August 23rd, 2009

Thank you all for the good feedback at the FrOSCon/OpenSQL Camp 2009. We have put our BlackRay presentation online (as SWF, PDF and OpenOffice Document) so you can look at what you may have missed at the conference.

Please feel free to contact any of us with any comments or suggestions you may have.

See you at FrOSCon and the next OpenSQL Camp.

OpenSQL Camp 2009

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

We are very happy to announce that our submission for the OpenSQL Camp 2009 was successful. OpenSQL Camp is a free conference of, by, and for the open-source database community of users and developers. BlackRay will be presented in a technical talk, and there will be plenty of chances to talk to the people behind the data engine.

As soon as we know the exact schedule, we will post an announcement here. Our talk will cover these areas

  • Brief retrospective and history: Why did we even bother to build this?
  • Basic engine architecture
  • Index perspectives
  • Query path optimization
  • Current roadmap and state of development
  • Integration with other excellent engines – MySQL/MariaDB and PostgreSQL in particular

See you all in St. Augustin on August 22nd & 23rd!

We need your support – vote for us @OpenSQLCamp 2009

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

We have proposed a talk at FrosCon/OpenSQL Camp, but we need your votes for our proposal, which you can see here. As there are 27 talks but only 12 slots, we need your support to get a chance and spread our message. Voting is done via twitter or a google group. Full instructions for the voting can be found here. Quick vote works like this:

Our session-ID is 456. To vote, use twitter and send a message to @opensqlcamp:

@opensqlcamp 456 +1

with an optional message (in parentheses):

@opensqlcamp 456 +1 (give the new kid some room to talk)

Thank you, and see you at OpenSQLCamp 2009!

SoftMethod Forge open for Business….

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

After many months of deliberation, choosing TRAC plugins, subversion authentication mechanisms, and other stuff, we have come to a conclusion!

First of all, we no longer use TRAC. Sorry to say this to the guys at Edgewall – TRAC does kick ass. But, it does SUCK at maintaining multiple projects. We have evaluated many plugins. They are all crap. Sorry, no offence to the guys making them. TRAC simply is NOT designed for multiple projects

Enter the stage: Redmine!

So it is writtten in Ruby, on rails. As a kid, rails and railways ruled my daily schedule. What about now? Ruby on Rails kicks ass – and not my ass I must add! Thx @rubyonrails! You guys are awesome.

Ok, so we do not know the language it is made with. Actually similar to TRAC – remember anyone excited to work themselves into Clearsilver, Genshi and NEON? Nope. Nope. Nope!

Learning Ruby does work out to be fun. It ain’t quite as cool as Java. But, for a dynamically typed language, it is quite structured, and after doing the tutorials 1-4 I do kick ass as a Ruby Ninja (hey, please DO protect me in combat!)

Now that the forge is up, be agile, be quick, be nimble and tell me anything that did not work…..

Keep busy! Felix

PS: See you at https://forge.softmethod.de